antler carving up-date

The plates of antler I cut from the palmate sections of the fallow deer antler work in a completely dfferent way from the section I used for the moon and owl in oak tree netsuke. The sections of palmate antler are fairly soft and take stain readily, for instance. The most important thing to note is that the nearer the centre of the palm you get, the thinner the surface layer gets until it almost dissapears entirely, so if you need to cut plates to carve then you should really try to avoid the central 2 inch area. The other draw back is that if you need to carve off the surface 1mm or so of brown antler to reveal the white beneath, then you will significantly reduce the amount of material you have to work with, and in this central area, you may only have 1mm of material to start with.